Schwarzschild radius: If an object is compressed to a size less than its Schwarzschild radius, then it will undergo gravitational collapse to form a black hole. The Schwarzschild radius is directly proportional to the mass of the object; for the sun's mass it is about three kilometers.
Semi-Riemannian space: This is a generalization of a Riemannian space, where a distinction is made between events separated by "spacelike" and "timelike" distances. Space-time in General Relativity is a four-dimensional semi-Riemannian space.
Shaper: A programming language for building elaborate structures, such as conscious neural networks, by means of iterative methods abstracted from biological processes.
Shaper: A small subprogram within a Shaper program.
Signature: The unique identifying hit string of each citizen in the Coalition of Polises. The full signature consists of public and private segments; only the signature's owner knows the private segment. Any citizen can use the public segment to encode a message that only the owner can decode.
Snapshot: A file containing a complete description of a citizen, or a scanned flesher, not actually being run as a program and hence subjectively frozen, experiencing nothing.
Sphere: See N-sphere.
Standard fiber: See fiber bundle.
Static: A flesher with no modified genes.
Symbol: The representation within a mind of a complex concept or entity—such as a person, a class of objects, or an abstract idea.
Tag: A packet of gestalt data used to convey miscellaneous non-visual information.
Tau: A unit of internal time, applicable across the Coalition of Polises. The equivalent in real time initially declined as polis hardware was improved, but stabilized around 2750 when the technology hit fundamental physical constraints. The subjective duration varies from citizen to citizen, depending on details of their minds' architecture, but some rough citizen-flesher equivalents are given below. Pluraclass="underline" tau.
Internal time equivalent (after 2750)
Subjective
Real time
1 tau
1 second
1 millisecond
1 kilotau
15 minutes
1 second
100 kilotau
1 day
1 min 40 sec
1 megatau
10 days
16 min 40 sec
1 gigatau
27 years
11 days 14 hours
1 teratau
27,000 years
32 years
Tesseract: A four-dimensional version of a cube. A three-dimensional cube has six square faces, twelve edges, and eight vertices. A four-dimensional tesseract has eight cubic hyperfaces, twenty-four square faces, thirty-two edges, and sixteen vertices.
Topological space: An abstract set of points, plus the bare minimum of additional structure required to determine the way in which they're connected to each other: a collection of certain subsets of points, defined to be the "open sets" of the space. (In the Euclidean plane, the open sets are just the interiors of circles of any radius, or unions of any number of such circles.) A point P is called a "limit point" of a set U if every open set containing P also contains at least one point of U—implying that P is arbitrarily close to U, without necessarily belonging to it. (For example, any point on the border of a circle would be a limit point of its interior.) Then a set W is called connected if it can't be divided into two pieces, U and V, such that V contains no limit points of U. (A figure-eight in the plane would be connected, but the interiors of the loops would not.)
Trait field: In a mind seed, a field where a number of different instruction codes are known to produce safe variations of some trait.
UT: Universal Time. Conventional astronomical/political system of specifying physical date and time, equivalent to local mean time at the Greenwich meridian. Universal Time is extended across interstellar distances by use of a reference frame at rest with respect to the sun.
Wormhole: A wormhole is a "detour" in space-time, similar to the detour in the surface of the Earth created by an underground tunnel. In general, the distance through wormhole can be either shorter or longer than the ordinary distance between its mouths. In Kozuch Theory, all elementary particles are the mouths of extremely narrow wormholes.
REFERENCES
The broad principles of the Konishi citizens' mental architecture were inspired by the human cognitive models of Daniel C. Dennett and Marvin Minsky. However, the details are my own fanciful inventions, and the Konishi model is intended to describe, not the current human mind, but a hypothetical software descendant. Dennett's and Minsky's models are described in:
Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett, Penguin, London, 1992.
The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky, Heinemann, London, 1986.
Kozuch Theory is fictitious. The idea of a correspondence between wormhole mouths and elementary particles is due to John Wheeler, while the possibility of accounting for particle symmetries through wormhole topology was inspired by the Dirac belt trick and Louis H. Kauffman's quaternion demonstrator. I encountered these ideas in:
Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity by John Baez and Javier P Muniain, World Scientific, Singapore, 1994.
Knots and Physics by Louis H. Kauffman, World Scientific. Singapore, 1993.
Lacerta G-1 is fictitious, and its accelerated orbital decay only makes sense in terms of the novel's invented cosmology. The closest known binary neutron star consists of a pulsar, PSR B1 534+12, and its companion; this system is 1500 light years away, and is not expected to coalesce for about one billion years. Gamma-ray bursts are a real phenomenon, though it remains unclear whether or not they're produced by colliding neutron stars. Information on binary neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts, gravitational radiation, gravitational astronomy, and the behavior of wormholes in General Relativity was drawn from:
Black Holes, White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars by S. L. Shapiro and S. A. Teukolsky, Wiley, New York, 1983.
"Binary Neutron Stars" by Tsvi Piran, Scientific American, May 1995.
"Gamma Ray Bursts" by John G. Cramer, Analog, October 1995.
Black Holes and Timewarps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip S. Thorne, Macmillan, London, 1995.
The detailed effects of Lac G-1 on Earth are speculative, but as a starting point I used:
"Terrestrial Implications of Cosmological Gamma-Ray Burst Models" by Stephen Titorsett, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 1 May 1995.
The particle acceleration method employed in the Forge is based on:
"PASER: particle acceleration by stimulated emission of radiation" by Levi Schachter, Physics Letters A, 25 September 1995 (volume 205, no. 5).